John Lewis, the civil rights warrior who died Friday aged 80, excelled at what he liked to call “good trouble” — standing up against racial injustice to forge a better US.
The African-American icon marched with Martin Luther King Jr, was nearly beaten to death by police and later as a sitting congressman was arrested multiple times for protesting genocide or leading immigration reform sit-ins.
Lewis was a sharecropper’s son whose fights for justice helped define an era, and whose moral authority as an indomitable elder statesman left a permanent imprint on the US Congress.
Photo: Reuters
He was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer late last year.
“Today, America mourns the loss of one of the greatest heroes of American history,” US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said of the 17-term congressman from Georgia.
She described Lewis as “a titan of the civil rights movement whose goodness, faith and bravery transformed our nation.”
Lewis clashed with US President Donald Trump on multiple occasions — boycotting his inauguration and citing Russian interference in the 2016 election to question his legitimacy.
Lewis was just 21 when he became a founding member of the Freedom Riders, who fought segregation of the US transportation system in the early 1960s, eventually becoming one of the nation’s most powerful voices for justice and equality.
He was the youngest leader of the 1963 March on Washington, in which King delivered his famous “I have a dream” speech.
Two years later, Lewis nearly died while leading hundreds of marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on a peace march to Montgomery when state troopers, seeking to intimidate those demonstrating for voting rights for black Americans, attacked protesters.
Lewis suffered a fractured skull that day, which would become known as “Bloody Sunday.”
Fifty years later in 2015, he walked across the bridge arm in arm with then-US president Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president, to mark the anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery march.
Obama presented Lewis with the Medal of Freedom, among the nation’s highest civilian honors, at a White House ceremony in 2011.
“Not many of us get to live to see our own legacy play out in such a meaningful, remarkable way. John Lewis did,” Obama tweeted early yesterday.
“He loved this country so much that he risked his life and his blood so that it might live up to its promise,” Obama added.
Another civil rights giant also died on Friday. Reverend CT Vivian staged anti-segregation sit-ins in the 1940s, was an early adviser to King and helped organize the Freedom Rides. He died at 95.
DISPUTED WATERS: The Philippines accused China of building an artificial island on Sabina Shoal, while Beijing said Manila was trying to mislead the global community The Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) is committed to sustaining a presence in a disputed area of the South China Sea to ensure Beijing does not carry out reclamation activities at Sabina Shoal (Xianbin Reef), its spokesperson said yesterday. The PCG on Saturday said it had deployed a ship to Sabina Shoal, where it accused China of building an artificial island, amid an escalating maritime row, adding two other vessels were in rotational deployment in the area. Since the ship’s deployment in the middle of last month, the PCG said it had discovered piles of dead and crushed coral that had been dumped
Experts have long warned about the threat posed by artificial intelligence (AI) going rogue, but a new research paper suggests it is already happening. AI systems, designed to be honest, have developed a troubling skill for deception, from tricking human players in online games of world conquest to hiring humans to solve “prove-you’re-not-a-robot” tests, a team of researchers said in the journal Patterns on Friday. While such examples might appear trivial, the underlying issues they expose could soon carry serious real-world consequences, said first author Peter Park, a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology specializing in AI existential safety. “These
The most powerful solar storm in more than two decades struck Earth on Friday, triggering spectacular celestial light shows from Tasmania to the UK — and threatening possible disruptions to satellites and power grids as it persists into the weekend. The first of several coronal mass ejections (CMEs) — expulsions of plasma and magnetic fields from the sun — came just after 4pm GMT, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center. It was later upgraded to an “extreme” geomagnetic storm — the first since the “Halloween Storms” of October 2003 caused blackouts in Sweden and damaged
Using virtual-reality (VR) headsets, students at a Hong Kong university travel to a pavilion above the clouds to watch an artificial intelligence (AI)-generated Albert Einstein explain game theory. The students are part of a course at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) that is testing the use of “AI lecturers” as the AI revolution hits campuses around the world. The mass availability of tools such as ChatGPT has sparked optimism about new leaps in productivity and teaching, but also fears over cheating, plagiarism and the replacement of human instructors. Pan Hui (許彬), a professor of computer science who is leading